Part 17

But be all that as it may, I am yet persuaded that it is by some such means as I have here touched on that all biography of the better sort must in time be written. Turn where we will among the great, we find facts of date and birth and schooling and death and all outward circumstance to have been the lesser factors. All these Time at last--the only lastingly considerable biographer--rejects and throws away. That which Time retains as precious and imperishable is rather some fine essence of the spirit, some essential personality built up and moulded by preferences, predilections, and prepossessions of a most highly spiritual order. The loves, the desires, the dear delights of men; the returning dreams, the recurrent longings that will not be gainsaid; the dead and long-lost dreamings that revisit the glimpses of our moon--these are indeed the spirits of us, and our immortalities.

Nor is it only as aids to a more just analysis of the great that these infinitely subtle influences may be considered. _Plus on connait de langues plus on est de personnes_. If the knowledge of another language gives one another life, as it were,--makes of one yet another person,--what may not be said to be added unto us by the knowledge--not the mere speculation, but the intimate knowledge--of another soul, and that soul one of the great ones of the earth?

This can be had only by an intimate companionship, not with the mere flagrant facts, but with the spiritual visitings, the dear desires and predilections, which haunt all rich lives significantly, perpetually, even as they haunt life itself.

For life is but an infinitely ancient abode, haunted by recurring presences surpassingly spiritual; as he knows who has seen death pass in and out of the ancient chambers in the night watches, or who has heard the autumn rains how reminiscent in patient woodlands, or who has been aware of lovely springs long-gone keeping tryst at certain seasons with the evening star in the twilight, or has felt them stealing back, ghostly and exquisite, when the April crescent hangs thoughtful and remote above dark apple-boughs.

In life as in lives, the presences move dark and dread or shining and lovely; and in the lives of the great as in life itself the shining and lovely would seem to be the more constant visitants. It is not to be forgotten that, though Banquo knocks his fearful summons, and the murdered Dane speaks with hollow mouthings, yet drifting forms dance no less gayly and delicately on midsummer nights in woodsy hollows by the moon.

It is noteworthy and remarkable that even those among the great whose lives have been sombre with tragedy have been visited--indeed they often more than others--by recurring influences of a most haunting beauty, like Beethoven, who with ears dull yet heard high symphonies, and Milton, who with sight closed to all outward loveliness saw yet in the darkened chambers a vision as of squadrons of bright-harnessed angels ranged in order serviceable, and knew the pastures and the silent woods to be full of sweet voices and light steps:--

Oh, friend, I hear the tread of nimble feet, Hasting this way!

It is of all such haunting and recurrent presences, be they dread or lovely, that he who most knows life is most aware, and that he who would know the lives of great men must be most sensitively observant. These are the things that must be watched for faithfully and with a whole heart and a single devotion: 'Here, sweet lord, at your service!' Leaving all prejudice or interest of our own, it is for us, in studying the lives of great men, to make their affair ours as wholly as may be; and to forget ourselves in a knowledge so much more dearly to be desired.

And by no means, I believe, may this be done so surely as by a patient study of those high elections, those persistent hauntings of mind and spirit which have influenced and, it may be, in so large a measure directed the lives of all great men; giving their mind its bent, their personality its leanings; often guiding, it must be, their motives, and suggesting their high behaviors; laying upon them, as the ghost upon Hamlet, purposes and duties thence never to be avoided, inevitably to be discharged; lending to their speech its lovely and broidered figures, or to the work of the hand its so memorable distinctions, and to all their activities that which we call 'characteristic'--something particularly and peculiarly their own; some chosen and essential and precious manner of expression which, mortal though they be, lives on, surviving them; and which is not to be found elsewhere in its kind or measure throughout all the rich and inexhaustible ages.

The Acropolis and Golgotha

By Anne C. E. Allinson

The following letters contain a true record of a mind's journey.

ATHENS, _May 1, 1914_.

MY DEAR FRIEND:--

We drove in from Eleusis this afternoon, once more breathlessly watching the Acropolis offer its white and golden marbles to adornment by the setting sun. Our Greek winter is drawing to an end and this was our good-bye visit to the Mysteries. How clear and lucid the beauty of the place seemed to-day, from the brightness of the sea and the firm modeling of the mountains to the bloom of the placated earth! Demeter and Persephone were evidently together in safety, the mystery of the unseen forgotten in the palpable joy of life restored.

On our way back we stopped, of course, at the Convent of Daphne, to make ourselves tea in the sunlit courtyard, and to take one more look at the Byzantine mosaics. I confess that this time they seemed to me quaint bits of the wreckage of mediaevalism cast upon the shore of Hellenism. If the mediaeval part of Christianity is as inextricable as you say it is, then I will grant you that 'Christian thought' is an outworn system compared with the immortal mind of Greece. As we crossed the bridge over the Cephisus, the Parthenon, which is far more mutilated than the little convent, once more sent abroad from broken colonnades and crumbling pediments the impression that some perennial spirit and undying vitality had, indeed, as Plutarch once suggested, mingled in its very composition. The Shrine of Wisdom seemed to take up and weld together all the mysticism and all the rationalism of the world.

Was it really ten years ago that I wrote to you after such another journey along the Sacred Way? And ten more still since I last saw you at the little station of Eleusis? You were going back to Patras to take ship for Italy, and we--and those others--had ended an afternoon spent among the ruins by speculating on

those great nights of Demeter, Mystical, holy.

I remember how sure you were that the wilder ideas in the Mysteries, which allowed for the redeeming death of gods and over-stated immortality, were but vagrants in the ordered area of Greek reason and sanity. Somebody older and wiser than I began to appeal to Plato on behalf of Greek transcendentalism, but you retorted that he was only the most disorderly vagabond of them all. Then your train clattered into the toy station, and you held my hand for a moment and said with a kind smile, '_Au revoir, petite savante, icibas_.'

But we never have seen each other again and probably never shall. Only an odd accident, you know, led to the annual letters which have spun the leisurely web of intimacy between two travelers so disparate in age and in nationality. You said that the differences in our experience, speech and traditions were lost in our common pilgrimage to Greece. My youth reminded you of the youth of Hellas, your age embodied for me her store of wisdom.

It is your book which has set me on the trail of these old memories. For when we began our letters you said that, since we knew little of each other's objective lives, we should have to concern ourselves with inner impressions; and now your printed opinions open up the question how the years have treated us in this matter of subjective experience. For one thing, automatically they have made me your equal. When we met, you, at forty-five, had experienced middle age. At sixty-five you are but confirming its revelation. You have yet to come to the fresh experience of old age. So that now, when I am forty-five, I may for a time talk with you eye to eye.

Your twenty years, unless you have misled me, have held no transforming experiences. Joys have but grown more dear and familiar. Sorrows, of a shattering kind, have let you alone. Your work prospers, your fame is assured, your children have grown up to be well in body and mind. All your fruit is ripening in the tranquil sunshine. My years, on the other hand, sweeping me out of the twenties into the forties, have been packed with fresh happenings to heart and head and will. Disaster has been left out of the brew, but almost everything else I have tasted. Perhaps this difference between us--unless it is one of sex--explains why you, in the books you have written lately, deal with philosophies and religions as if they sprang, Athena-like, out of the intellect, while to me they seem the issue of a normal union: if they are begotten of thought they are brought forth in anguish by experience.

In this last book you are interested in Hellenism and Christianity as forms--or attributes--of 'civilization.' I cannot forget that each of them means the way in which men and women have managed and are managing their diurnal round. You remember, don't you, the delightful story of Plato lecturing one day in the Academy on the Absolute Good, and his audience drifting away from him--except one man who was Aristotle? I have often wondered about the different things the other men did that day after they had run away from the Idea! At any rate the complex was as 'Hellenic' as the conversation of the philosophers.

And when one turns to Christianity,--why, the very philosopher who first intellectualized a Way and a Life had himself been born anew of the intensely personal experience of sin and repentance. Do you know Frederic Myers's _Saint Paul_?--ah! there was a 'Greek scholar' who understood a Christian!--

So shall all speech of now and of to-morrow, All he hath shown me or shall show me yet, Spring from an infinite and tender sorrow, Burst from a burning passion of regret.

You, reading history, would be willing to obliterate Christianity and restore Hellenism as a universal ideal. I would rather see them united in each separate life.

Before I explain what I mean by this I must beguile you by some agreement with you in your criticism of 'cardinal' Christian doctrines! You are right, I think, in objecting to the emphasis laid by the church upon a future life. But you seem to me unnecessarily disturbed by a theory. Christians, like the followers of many other faiths, do 'believe' in immortality. In fact, I suspect that only specifically intellectual people actually disbelieve in it--and, with all respect to yourself, I must add that the opinion of intellectualists on the destiny of the spirit fails to hold my attention! The authority of the spiritually gifted--including both Socrates and St. Francis--is overwhelmingly on the side of the soul being immortal. But does that make any more difference in the life of the flesh to-day than in the time of Alcibiades? Mediaeval Christians certainly went mad over heaven and hell; but who now neglects Demeter's green earth for apocalyptic visions? You are depressed by a shadow cast from the printed page. Stop reading and look about at your friends! They are not too startled by the white radiance of eternity to install the latest electric lights!

As to your horror over the Christian 'adoration of suffering,' that seems to me better founded in view of the historic and continued insistence upon the cross as a symbol. I agree with you. I can scarcely express the revulsion which I feel in picture galleries before the endless succession of crucifixions and tortured saints. Until we conquer disease or discard violence there will be physical suffering in the world. But it is a thing to fight against, not to worship. For man to have painted and carved as _beautiful_ a racked body seems to me an insult to the God who made straight limbs and fair flesh, and a strange betrayal of the Galilean who wished to heal the suffering of others as long as he lived, and only accepted it for himself as an incidental necessity at the end. _He_ had no mediaeval disregard for the flesh. The agony in Gethsemane consisted in facing the obligation to offer up a body and a life which were very precious to him. The glory consisted in the sacrifice, not in the temporary torture to which it led. Love, not suffering, is the core of Christianity. A truer symbol than the defeated body on the cross would be the same body strong and beneficent among men.

Here the Periclean sculptor would have done better for us than the mediaeval painter. But only here. Neither he nor any of his contemporaries could have understood Gethsemane. Their greatness consisted in their selection, out of the prodigal abundance which lies before man, of noble possessions. They were far superior to the Puritans in that they retained art with morals, and they were equally superior to the modern Romanticists in that they picked and chose only such beauty as they believed could be amalgamated with character. Their inferiority to the Christians lay in their failure to hold their treasures in trust for humanity.

And now I come back to my argument against you. We who boast of being the 'heirs of the ages' need not be as limited as you imply. The modern man or woman can combine the Greek ideal of self-development with the Christian ideal of self-dedication. In reality, I am not arguing, but asserting. I know that this union is possible by the only evidence which is admissible--the evidence of a life. I have known for many years one person who unites in a normal experience your grandiose abstractions of Christianity and Hellenism. This person is my mother. Do not take her sex as an obstacle. She is a better example than some famous man might be, because her character is not obscured by public achievement. She has none of the limitations of a profession or career, or of some unique strain of genius. What she is creates careers or feeds genius. She is the most complete human being I have ever known, and yet her wholeness is a presage of what we all might become. It is to a life like this that you ought to go when you take stock of the philosophies of the world!

My mother's external fortune, judged by Greek standards, is good--too good, of course, for a woman. She has received from fate much that would have satisfied a Greek man: the consciousness of citizenship in a proud and prospering nation; health, long life, an active mind, and enough money to live tastefully; and, finally, satisfactory children (if I may be permitted to say this) and the approval of her fellow citizens. The Greek estimate of the importance of such approval springs, I suppose, from intense feeling for the communal life. No Greek man could be mentally less confined to the walls of a house than is my mother, and an Athenian voter could scarcely have served his _polis_ more completely than she serves our little town. The only difference here between her and a Periclean citizen is that she is perplexed and shy rather than expectant and gratified when evidences of public approval are forced upon her.

In natural endowment, also, my mother is singularly Greek, because she possesses diverse qualities harmoniously welded into one whole. We are conscious of no contradictions in her, and yet she is both sane and imaginative, sensitive and practical, dominating and gentle.

Finally, in her conscious activities she is Greek. There is, for example, her moral insistence upon form and beauty. If you could live in her house for a day you would see Hellenism as a diurnal practice. Her taste is flawless; everything she touches turns to beauty and to a tranquillizing order and simplicity. She selects a vase or a baking dish with the aesthetic fastidiousness which beset the artists and artisans of Athens.

And, furthermore, she is Greek in her perennial enthusiasm for fresh knowledge. Her enjoyment of life seems to me intense because she is never tired of exploring the world through every kind of human achievement. She has the curiosity of the Hellenic mind. The Athenian men who were like her made it worth while for other men to be scientists and philosophers and poets.

And yet my mother is a Christian. You see what I believe she has and is. Well, all of this she takes in her two hands and _offers_ daily. Of course, she believes in immortality, but she never talks about the future life, and I have told you of her vigorous interest in this one. Of course, too, she has known many sorrows--who has not at seventy?--but she has consistently concealed pain and suffering instead of enthroning them. Her Christianity is compounded of Love. As it streams out from her it is the creative, regenerating passion for humanity which transcended the reasoned good-will of the pagan philosophers and transcends the materialistic serviceableness of the modern humanitarians. In the noblest pagan literature there is no emotion at all resembling that which suffuses the New Testament. In this emotion my mother lives and moves and has her being.

I snap my fingers at Nietzscheism when I realize that she is the strongest personality in my little world. She dies daily for us, but we live her way! No superman could impose his will more effectively than this Christian in whom power and sacrifice are one. God is love. If all history tried to make me a skeptic my mother's nature would keep me a believer.

Whoso hath felt the spirit of the Highest Cannot confound nor doubt him nor deny; Yea with one voice, O world, tho' thou deniest, Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.

I have spoken of my mother's health and energy. Just lately these have flagged a little, and I came away this time with some misgivings, and only for my husband's sake. But her letters have quite reassured me. Lately she wrote, 'I am daily thankful that nothing prevented you from spending this winter on the Acropolis. In thinking of you I can't manage to dislodge you from the hill long enough to eat and sleep.'

She knows me! We have traveled all over the country this year, but always come back to Athens and the Attic plain as to the heart of Greece. We went to Egypt in midwinter, and on our return hurried almost from the ship to the Parthenon. It had snowed lightly and the whitened summits of Pentelicon and Hymettus and Parnes lay in sharp relief under the brilliant sky. A Greek friend of mine, looking at these fleshless mountains, said proudly, 'It is not every one who dares show her bones.' Attica needs no softening mist, no glamorous moonlight, no romantic obscuration. Her beauty is born of light and her teaching is light. In Egypt man was mocked by the desert. Small wonder the Christian saints hid themselves there to punish their poor bodies! Here man seeks the sun and stands erect in his dignity. Mediaevalism, I grant you, must make way for this immortal humanism. The 'mystery of suffering' is an invention of distorted minds. Stripped of disguise, suffering is merely an evil to be done away with by Love. This, I take it, is the message of the Acropolis to the Christian.

We are leaving next week for a month in London, and then home. May Fortune multiply your royalties and Athena inspire another book!

Faithfully yours.

P.S. The American mail is just in. A letter from a neighbor in my native town says that no one in my mother's house will disobey her order that I am not to be sent for, but that I am greatly needed. It is possible that she will not live until I can reach her. We shall sail for New York day after to-morrow. My world begins to crumble.

PINELANDS, MAINE, _April 20, 1915_.

MY DEAR FRIEND:--

As I begin this letter there flashes into my mind the last sentence which I wrote to you a year ago from Greece--that my little world was crumbling. And since then how your own world has been shattered, and the universe almost set reeling in its course! I remember how I talked on in that letter about areas of experience, blocking you off into twenty-year periods! I thought then that only the years would carry us into new seas. But in twelve months you have been swept from the moorings of your middle life. France is again facing the enemy as she did in your boyhood, but now your sons are risking lives more precious than your own. Your wife and daughters are nursing the wounded and the stricken. You, 'too old to fight,'--and so in a flash set forward into old age,--are nevertheless finding your pen tipped with passion instead of with philosophy. One of your lyrics is being sung in the trenches. You are no longer an intellectualist, but a voice of France. And thousands upon thousands of other men and women are experiencing a similar metamorphosis. Who knows what new philosophies and religions will be born?

I have been wondering whether you would still call Plato an intruder and vagabond in Hellenism. Greek thought changed under the shock to Athenian civilization caused by the Peloponnesian War. By this abstraction do we mean anything else than that Plato and other men had brought home to them the transitoriness of prosperity, the helplessness of morals, learning, and art before a recrudescence of primitive violence, and the limitations of humanism? The material stage in those days was small,--little states wage a little war,--but in view of her spiritual importance the suffering of Athens was a world-experience of the first magnitude. Possibly Plato seems to you now less a vagrant than a pilot.

For certainly our 'new religion,' if we bring one to birth, cannot be composed of truths wholly unknown before. Some of our new creative energy will go into stripping the veil from the face of that Reality which men at one time and another have beheld. I find it easy to believe this because through an intensive personal experience of my own I have been brought to perceive a truth which is two thousand years old. Last year I argued about Christianity, choosing this part, discarding that. This year I have knelt and touched the hem of the seamless robe. The experience would be too intimate and sacred to reveal were it not bound up with your own. Let me tell you about it. It is the only way in which I can talk with you about your sons who are facing death and suffering.

I wrote you that I was called home from Athens by my mother's illness. She died last month. During the intervening months revelation after revelation came to me. My mother had grown worse rapidly and at first I was shocked to my innermost heart by the change in her. All her strength seemed turned to weakness. Her rich and varied life had shrunk to the hushed quiet of a sick-room. Her tranquil face had become haggard. Her eager intellect had slipped away from her. There was nothing left of the beautiful Hellenism of her life. A Periclean Greek would now have seen in her only an illustration of the shadow lurking within the sunshine, the tragedy of bodily weakness and old age and death.

And since she no longer had riches to offer, what had become of her Christianity? The question could not frame itself, for I was caught and lifted out of my despair by the swift impression that about my frail mother there glowed a radiance which outshone the sunlight of her active years. The dayspring from on high had but put to flight the lesser stars. Every one who could see her was conscious of it. One of her nurses said to me, 'She is so different from the weak people I've seen before. I feel so _warm_, somehow, when I'm with her.'